Our: The Big Farts (TBF) mega infographic and search engine is no longer. It is time to say goodbye to that.

This was a tool designed in 2018 for our book The Origin of Most Problems meant to showcase how s few companies own pretty much anything in this society: food, drinks, electronics, software, medicine, you name it....

It was a great summary of this fuckedup monopolized society. We even had a search engine that was searching through hundreds of thousands of brands so you can see who owns what.

But over time this has become obsolete since the "farts" are called farts for a reason. They come and go. Companies acquire other companies, brands change, some go bankrupt, etc.. We do not have the resources to keep this updated, so it is time to let it go after 6 years.

In the book we still give a shocking overview of the monopolization of our society, therefore the point remains solid and valid.

It was so much effort to make this TBF page but we knew it is going to be a temporary tool.

Goodbye! We hope that some people got to use it and it opened their minds about the state of our society.

#capitalism #monopoly #monopolies #money #rich #brands

Dear wonderful people, we need help.

We created TROM.tf 3 years ago and the aim was to provide trade-free services for everyone. A social network, a video platform with unlimited uploads, a file sharing platform with 10GB of storage and 20GB on request, a chat, and more. There are between 2 and 3 thousand users across these platforms and that's fantastic!

However to keep these platforms alive and up to date, plus add more, we need some financial help. And the kind we need is quite unique.

Listen,

We need 200 people to donate 5 Euros a month in order to support this project forever. That's all. Here - tromsite.com/donate/

Distributed power via small donations to make it sustainable. There are currently 80 people who are our backers, so we are 40% funded. If a small fraction (120 people) of the ones that get this email would support us, then we could make this sustainable.

But please don't ignore this message thinking that others will donate so why should you? The bystander effect is a real issue with these "call to action" approaches. Since there are others who are receiving this email, you may think that they will do something about it and that makes you, and me, and everyone else, less likely to act. And so, many people will not act, unfortunately.

We store over 2-3 TB of data, most of which are your files. We keep a server running 24/7 and make sure everything works well and it is secure. We need to pay for the servers, backups, and some food and basic necessities for at least 1 human in order to keep all of this alive.

You won't only support TROM.tf but the entire TROM Project and an upcoming video series.

Yon can donate here tromsite.com/donate/

Card, Paypal, and more options are available.

---------

You have received this email because you are one of the TROM.tf users. Hopefully this is the first and only email you will receive from us, but we desperately need some help now.

---------

Cheers,

Tio

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Do not forget that the internet, youtube, netflix, cars and supermarkets, lightbulbs and modern medicine, do not make our society "civilized". These are a result of often enslaved humans producing "stuff" in a trade-based society. Technologically we, as a society, are quite advanced, but morally we are primitive.

Despite all of this technological progress humans are still forcing ALL of their billions of members to trade in order to survive, despite being able to feed, house, and take care of everyone on Earth. This means we are still primitive and have no greater goals such as exploration, the advancement of technology and science, understanding where we came from and where we are heading... All that humans do is trade, day in, day out.

Slaves and slave owners. Simple minds. Robots.

If you take away the electrification, internet, the gadgets, the hot water and the mass produced products - stuff - you are left with the "naked" humans who all they want is to acquire more, get "married", work, have kids, drink, and cheer up for their tribe.

It is the environment who creates these behaviors so if we do not change the "mental" environment, nothing will happen. We do not need new tech, new science, new materials. We need new lives for the individuals of this species. Lives that are relaxed and taken care of. Scientific, globally oriented, and to live in a non competitive environment.

So the UN or other institutions, if they ever want to solve any global issues, they need to first propose that we should take care of people and create a decent life for them. All of them, not just the very poor. We are all trapped in this trade-prison. You can't expect for a different society to emerge when all humans do is to slave away and compete with each other. Dog eats dog world.

Happy 1st of May to all of the slaves who got a day off. What a disgrace of a society.

#may #fistofmay #worker #capitalism #money #1may #trade

Hey people,

We have changed the way we deal with the 200 FOR TROM campaign in terms of donations. Let me explain.

Ideally we wanted to have a simple donation campaign where people can only contribute 5 Euros a month - no more, no less. However pretty much no Wordpress plugin is designed for this, since they are all geared towards selling products or creating campaigns where people can donate any amount. But I wanted to try something new by limiting the amount of money that people can donate monthly. I want to distribute the burden we put on individuals, but also to limit the growth of TROM, as a project, to a manageable "height".

The plugin we were using was not reliable at all and I even had to pay for it (which is ironic since we do not get enough financial support from the campaign itself). Because it is important to accept a wide variety of payment options, and "cards plus Paypal" are the most used worldwide, this plugin tried to combine Stripe (cards) with Paypal into one single campaign. But the plugin stopped working with Paypal and then could not communicate with Stripe anymore, so when a donation was canceled the plugin had no idea.

In short, we could not count how many people are still actively subscribed to the campaign via this plugin, so I ended up having to check in TROM's Stripe and Paypal accounts to see how many are subscribed...and then manually add that number to our donation page. On top of that I cannot pay for the plugin's subscription and therefore I cannot receive updates - and having an outdated plugin that deals with payments is not a good idea.

OK.

These being said it is time to give up on this plugin and rely directly on Stripe and Paypal. If anyone wants to support us they will be redirected to any of these websites where they can complete the payment and manage their subscriptions via them. It is the safest, easiest, and direct way of doing this. If the Stripe integration with Paypal will be enabled in the following days then perhaps we will only use Stripe which can process pretty much any kind of payment, including Paypal.

I hate dealing with these things, trust me.

What will happen to your current subscription?

If you want to cancel it, please contact us or reply to this email. If you want to change the payment method then it is better to ask us to cancel your subscription and then you can do it again. After that you can manage it via Stripe/Paypal. It is simple.

What about the wall of donors?

I would really love to have a "wall of donors", a list of people who are actively supporting this campaign...maybe this is a nice way of thanking them publicly. But right now I do not know how to do that since we use both Stripe and Paypal, and some people do not want their names to be displayed publicly. If Stripe enables Paypal as a payment option then maybe I can do something about this. Sorry! But also...this is not a fashion show and we all understand that. We need some financial support to maintain our projects that are about serious global problems and ways to think differently about "fixing" them. TROM is not a project that tries to blend into this system and find financial support to be "sustainable" in that sense - it is a way to scream and harness the anger towards something positive/educational/informative and helpful. And for that we simply need some financial help.

Lastly.

A big thank you to Marcel who became the 80st donor for our campaign while I was writing this message. And I appreciate all of you very much! We are almost half way there, and that gives me some hope. We have a lot of plans for TROM, so let's see how things will evolve. We will keep you posted.

Ok, that's all. Thank you!

Tio

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tio

2017-05-11 20:22:46

NEW BLOG POST:

Home

Read it on my website (recommended):

tiotrom.com/

Or read it here:

TIO

^TIO

@Sasha has released a big big book: Big World Small Sasha. Available here as trade-free bigworldsmallsasha.com/book/ - or you can buy the paperback version from the same link (there is no other way to provide it for free in that format).

Why is this book important and how is it related to TROM?

It is a wonderfully written book about her experience on this planet, and how she grew a mind to understand what's this society made of, what is our role in it, and how much we depend on the natural world. It is about the destruction we are causing, but also the so many wonderful people that exist out there, who care and do something about it.

All of that is perfectly layered with her adventurous adventures, some of which are hard to believe, others are so funny and fun. You can see her grow in this book, to become who she is today.

Sasha talks about this trade based society quite a bit, about the notion of trade-free, and also about TROM.

But,
If you think the book is about Sasha, you are wrong.
If you think the book is about hitchhiking and traveling, you are wrong.
If you think the book is about this trade-based society, you are also wrong.
It is about all of these, and more. Dialogues, funny stories, a wonderful way of painting with words, Sasha did a fantastic job!

And after some 5 years of intense work, emotional roller-coasters, and being quite broke, she is brave enough to put the book for free online. No ads, no data collection, no subscribe here to read. No bullshit. If you appreciate that please support her.

So this is not just a book, it is an experience of living in this society and a unique way at looking at this society. A more real overview. It is also a neat and engaging way to introduce people to projects like TROM, and overall to make people question the status-quo.

Sasha is part of our small TROM team and she took part in our TROM II documentary as a lioness roaring facts and truths :D ! tromsite.com/documentaries/tro…

Go read her book, and enjoy her wonderful stories!

#bookrelease #capitalism #trade #nature #travel #hitchhiking #volunteer #tromlive

This is why we gave up Youtube officially:

YouTube will cut parts from your video now. Imagine that. In this case it is from a TROM II snippet that @Alexio shared on our "legacy" YouTube channel. Mind you the documentary is free for everyone and also educational, so in a sane world it should be fair use for whatever media we've used.

We are so thankful that @PeerTube exists! We can post all of our videos on our Peertube channel videos.trom.tf/c/trom/videos without being afraid that anything will be banned or cut out.

And to no surprise Facebook does the same:

Banned the same video in several countries....

Basically we are not using YouTube or Facebook anymore since 2 years ago. Only @Alexio and @Georgi post there from time to time, mirroring our Friendica or Peertube. We do that since there are still many people following TROM on those platforms unfortunately. We are always trying to bring them to the fediverse and to these sane platforms, but change is hard...

So for now at least if some of our content can be mirrored to these trade-platforms while encouraging those following us there to change their online habits and use these other trade-free alternative platforms, then so be it.

But it is another reminder of the stupidity of our world, emerged from the practice of trade where even the reproducible at no cost digital content is "owned" and traded, so that ideas like copyright are invented to protect them. Terrible.

Te digital is abundant so we should not even put restrictions in place. But you can't do that in a trade society since so many would take advantage of that for their own gain.

#TradeRuinsEverything #capitalism #copyright #facebook #youtube #tromlive

Hello dear people,

Let's keep it very brief.

Please help us pay for our yearly backups.

Every year we have to pay for a 4TB backup plan. This means, everything we have (from our documentaries and videos, to our books, or our websites) are all backed-up in a safe and encrypted place. This also includes our TROM.tf services, some 2TB of files, most of which are yours, the ones using TROM.tf. Your Nextcloud files, your Peertube videos, your encrypted Matrix conversations and so forth.

Thus, I ask you, to please consider helping us pay for this, since we are so low on money.

It only costs 300 Euros and we have to pay it in 2 weeks.

The campaign is here >>> tromsite.com/trom-backup/

This is a new newsletter system!

For the first time ever we are able to run our own newsletter system. In the beginning we've used MailChimp or other trade-based services, to then move to a Wordpress plugin solution that never worked well. This is the real deal and it makes everything so much better: from sending this newsletters to managing whatever lists we need. Therefore keep in mind that we are now sending the newsletters from newsletter.tromsite.com/

If you want to unsubscribe simply use the Unsubscribe button at the footer of this email.

A new video series in the making. We hope....

Starting the next month I plan to work on a new video series that should run indefinitely (I hope). It may take some time before I start to make and then post the videos, but I am convinced that I have to do this. I will give you more information once I am close to that moment.

I still feel like I have more energy in me to put up a fight, despite the fact that I do not get enough financial support to help me focus fully on TROM. I will have to spend more of my energy trying to trade and make some money in order to support myself and the project, and that kills me inside little by little. But this is a war for me, a war with this trade-based society. And I will get harmed, and I will have to give up on some projects if I cannot get enough support, but I will continue one way or another.

Much respect for those who are still interested in what we do at TROM and to those who can afford to support us.

Cheers,

Tio

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We have a brand new TROMnews website - tromnews.com/

The plugin that we've used for TROMnews for the past many years stopped working so we had to find a new one. When that happened I was sure I will have to let go of this website, simply because I need to focus on other things, especially personal stuff. If I were to get at least half the financial support that we need for TROM, then I could focus on these projects more.

But anyway, after talking to Sasha I realized that the website is indeed important, despite the fact that I am sure not many are using it. We will talk more about that. But first:

TROMnews is more work than you may think.

The idea is to pull news/videos/photos/etc from many online sources and coalesce them all into a website that makes sense. But choosing the sources, finding and RSS feed for them, and all that, is not as easy. Plus, some do not have an RSS feed so I have to use other services to create it on the fly. Also, the way I pull the RSS feeds is not arbitrary. For example I cannot grab all of the videos from a Youtube channel since that would include the absolutely retarded "shorts", so I have to tell the RSS to only pull the videos that are at least 2 minutes long. And so forth....

I ended up with over 200 sources: from websites to Youtube, from subReddits to playlists. I want to make sure we pull a featured image for each (or most posts), and to not overwhelm everyone with whatever I pull. Like I choose to pull from the subReddit "Sky Porn" only the images that have over X amount of votes. This way we make sure that add only a few a week, but the good ones. The amount of X in this case depends from subReddit to subReddit - I test these to see what's the best value.

Now you get 200 feeds that each can pull several items every hour or so. A server may struggle with so much stuff. And so the old plugin disabled many feeds daily, and I had to reactivate them to make them update...one by one, manually.

On top of all of this, I had filters for many of these feeds as to what posts can pull or exclude, based on keywords. Just to make it more relevant.

I use TROMnews daily, and so are a few friends. But I bet no one else uses it.

I want to stay in touch with what is happening in the world, but not the world of politics (the nonsense world), I want to know about science, tech, and the natural world mostly. I can so that via an RSS reader on my local machine, but my goal with TROMnews was always to provide a tool for others to stay informed and sane.

I started this project exactly 10 years ago. Because I feared that if people are idiots and feed their brains with bullshit then we have 0 chances to ever change anything in this world. Humans live inside of their brains, and if what's inside is bullshit, then they are bullshitters and we live in different worlds altogether, despite being on the same planet, inside the same reality. How can we build the future together?

If some think that gods made them, others that money is real, or that climate change is an invention, then we are fucked. And such a website makes it easy to keep your brain sane.

For me no other website is enough to use it as my news source. From BBC to PBS, or Scientific American, and so forth, they are plagued by politics and promotional articles. It is a mess.

Anyway, I spent many years trying to find the best sources, and subcategories on some good news websites that were still relevant, and I wanted them all in one place. This is why I use TROMnews. It is my main, and many times only, source of brain-food.

10 years ago when I released it I had some big hopes for it, because people were still able to choose stuff for themselves. Like they were intentionally visiting websites. Nowadays the vast majority of people are on maximum 5 platforms (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, or Instagram). And they are all fed whatever these companies want.

A vomit of ads and retarded content. And people stay, and eat. Scroll through an endless stream of whatever they are fed with.

Sick.

So I know that I cannot make people use TROMnews. And I do not care anymore. I and a few friends use it. Plus it is a very interesting website. That's enough for me.

The new website needs more work, but it is a bit more "interesting" in my view.

Before the website was simply displaying the same kind of cards for all categories and that's all. A bit boring. Even I was not that motivated to read the news - too many of the same cards, too many news. Now the homepage looks like a news website, highlighting every category.

We even have a Recommended Documentary section that automatically pulls from VideoNeat. :)

Every page is a bit more unique to emphasize whatever category is showcasing. Here's a cool photo I just found on TROMnews:

Freaking spider! :) - that's what I love about TROMnews - it is a bundle of interesting stuff, ranging from important news, to wonderful photos or super interesting videos. It is my place, and I am not giving up on it :P.

The advantage now is that I can have a lot more control over the individual items. I can probably add a proper search and even allow others to subscribe to our own feed. So that you can subscribe to our TROMnews NEWS. How cool....

I still need to add the Dark mode and tweak it for mobile screens, but also monitor it to make sure it all works well. I came across a bunch of issues with the auto-updating of sources so let's see if it is able to keep up with updating from over 200 rss feeds.

I also lack the ability to filter the feeds based on keywords, but I can live with that... What I'd like is the ability to showcase from where an item is. Like who posted this or that, as it was before. I can only do that if I buy the pro-bro version... So if I get enough financial support for TROM I will make TROMnews a bit better.

Oh, when I was searching for a replacement WordPress plugin for TROMnews I came across many RSS Aggregators. And all, without exception form my findings, are geared towards making more money. Of course.... Who is using them like I do, to pull science/tech/interesting news for all to see? No ads, no bs...

But I was aware of this, it was always the case. People use these plugins to pull stuff from other websites into their own, to then inject ads and make money. In turn destroying the internet, which has become a garbage bin made of vomited and re-vomited content. And now it is getting easier:

Welcome to the Internet 3.0. The complete fuckery, a tsunami of nonsense.

TROMnews is a little place of sane stuff. I hope some people appreciate it.

#tromlive